Originally Posted by Metro

CENTER CITY — A lawsuit from local socialite and PR man Anthony DiMeo III against New York Internet celebrity Tucker Max could challenge a new law that makes it illegal to annoy someone anonymously using a computer.

DiMeo’s suit alleges that comments made on TuckerMax.com message boards are libelous and violate new rules placed into the federal Communications Act as part of the Violence Against Women Act and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act.

The lawsuit says comments made on TuckerMax.com about DiMeo are libelous against new wording in the law, which makes it a crime to “annoy, abuse, threaten or harass” someone anonymously on the Internet. Posters have been making fun of DiMeo on Max’s Web site for a few years and began belittling him even more after a failed New Years’ Eve party organized by DiMeo’s Renamity PR firm.


Message boards included?

Ronald Collins, a scholar at the nonprofit First Amendment Center, said that the new wording in the anti-stalking law was meant to use rules against harassing telephone calls with Internet technologies such as e-mail, not message boards, which are seen as public conversations.

“This strikes me as a real stretch,” Collins said of the suit.

One of the lawmakers that helped craft the act, Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., said that it doesn’t pertain to message boards.

“I don’t think it has to say yes to message boards,” said DiMeo’s attorney, Matthew B. Weisberg. “It talks about any device. ... It sounds counterintuitive that Congress would pass a law prohibiting the type of behavior and then confine that prohibition to minimal areas.”


Law not settled

Max, a Duke law school grad who is representing himself, said he’s confident comments on his site aren’t libelous toward DiMeo. But, he said, the law over whether message boards are included in the new rules is unsettled.

“[DiMeo’s] trying to ...bully someone into limiting their own speech or trying to get the government to get something he can’t get on his own,” Max said. “He wants it so that no one can say anything mean about him or things people don’t like. That’s just not the way the world works.”


Annoying, but illegal?

• A new law signed by the president earlier this year makes it a crime to anonymously “annoy, abuse, threaten or harass” someone on the Internet.

• According to First Amendment scholar Ronald Collins, the law is worrisome because of its vague and overly broad interpretation of “annoy.”

• “It does tend to chill and even bar clearly protected speech,” he said.

• One Nevada company has gone to court to challenge the constitutionality of barring annoying speech.